JOHN POWERS

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Thank you for visiting my website. I am Fulltime Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. I hold a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I also received a joint minor in Art History and Media and Cultural Studies. My research combines historical and theoretical approaches to cinema with specialization in experimental and emergent film and video, moving image technologies, documentary media, and American film history. My current book manuscript, Conjuror’s Box: Technology as Cultural Resource in Experimental Film, examines the histories of four technologies––the Bolex camera, reversal film stock, film labs, and optical printing––and demonstrates their centrality to the aesthetics, politics, and culture of experimental media practices from the 1960s to the 1980s.

 

My writing on cinema has appeared or is forthcoming in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, Millennium Film Journal, Afterimage, and A Companion to Experimental Cinema.

 

I have also made experimental videos that have screened at venues such as Crossroads Festival, the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Unexposed Microcinema, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and the Big Muddy Film Festival.

 

At Washington University in St. Louis, I teach courses on the theory and practice of experimental film, contemporary women directors, documentary film and media, horror across media, film historiography, and digital cinema production.

 

I hold a BA in English from Aquinas College and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.